


Lilacs Out of Dead Land

by zuzeca



Category: X-Men - All Media Types, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Feels, Changing Tenses, Childhood Trauma, Concentration Camps, Fluff and Angst, Kissing in the Rain, M/M, Parent Death, The Beach Scene, X-Men First Class Kink Meme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-25
Updated: 2015-01-25
Packaged: 2018-03-09 00:05:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3228623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zuzeca/pseuds/zuzeca
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That day on the beach in Cuba, it rained.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lilacs Out of Dead Land

**Author's Note:**

> Another XMFC kinkmeme repost, for a deceptively simple prompt of dramatic kissing in the rain, which blindsided me and forced me up to unreasonable hours cranking this out. Link to the original prompt is [here](http://1stclass-kink.livejournal.com/8846.html?thread=18369678#t18369678). The title is borrowed from T.S. Eliot’s poem _The Waste Land_. For the curious, _mawsim_ is an Arabic term referring to a changing of winds and from which the word ‘monsoon’ is thought to be derived. Enjoy.

The day he was born, it rained.

Not his physical birth of course, he was a winter child, spat into being during the dry, chill months when wind and cold suck the moisture from air and ground and the mist clouds of one’s breath. But the day they took them to the camps, the day a pleasant, bespectacled man smiled at him without warmth and offered him chocolate which tasted of ash and burnt flesh, the day his mother, strong and steadfast, was simply snuffed out. 

That day, it rained.

It seems only appropriate now, as he steps from the ripped metal womb of the submarine, bearing the lifeless weight of the man who has been monster and teacher and father, who has shaped him in all the ways that matter, that it would be raining.

The skies are thick with cloud banks and the wind whips at him, tugging on Shaw’s dangling limbs as rain sheets down, dense and heavy. He can feel the impact of the drops, compact and hard, striking and soaking his suit, pinging off his helmet like bullets.

It’s a full blown tropical monsoon, like nothing he’s ever seen, even wandering the _pampas_ on his quest for tailors and pig farmers. It wraps a dense shroud across the island, drenching the sand and blurring the line between sea and sky.

Through the veil of water, Charles is shouting at him, his words stolen by the wind. He regards him dully, wondering why he bothers with words. Weak, human words, so easily silenced by rain, by thunder.

By a gunshot. 

He’s wearing the helmet, he remembers, and wonders briefly, staring at the grey, muted outline of the other man, if this is how Charles feels on the other side of it, the thick metal absorbing his powers, transforming persons into flat shades, washed of all color.

Something is rising within him. He can feel the restless shift of guns and missiles, and the tactician, so lovingly cultivated by Shaw, the tactician, who brings light to Charles’ eyes every time he captures his queen, tells him that now is the moment. _Homo sapiens_ time is over; he could call them to his side, brothers and sisters every one. They would be his army. But the wind engulfs his words, swallows them away in the spaces between the drops.

And then Charles is there before him, thick hair plastered to his skull, eyes squinted against the force of the rain.

“I can feel them,” he says, his voice hoarse. “Their guns, their metal, all pointed at us. Do you deny it?”

Charles has to step in close to be heard. A falsely intimate distance, he can feel the puff of hot breath on his face, “Erik—”

“Look. Tell me, what do you see?”

Something soft and pained lights those clear-sky eyes for a moment and then melts into a blank, glassy stare as Charles reaches, searches, and some part of him fancies he can sense the soft, quavering note as his mind breaks across the rock of the helmet, splitting and surging around it as he stretches out to thousands of seething minds, bobbing on the storm-swirled waters. And something of Shaw thrills within him at the stunning display, at the power contained within that small and unassuming form.

“You don’t have to tell me. I can sense what they’re about to do.”

The beach is cloaked in rain, but it makes no difference. He can feel the warships turning, iron filings aligning.

True north.

“Humanity has always sought to destroy what it fears, what it does not understand. But we are stronger. We can strike now, drive them into extinction. We’re the next phase, Charles. You said it yourself.” 

It’s peculiar, to have this conversation at hushed, close range. It seems a dialogue to be shouted, proclaimed, screamed to the heavens in defiance because _Never again._ will he see his people slaughtered and God may have abandoned them, but nature has made them into new gods. New gods for a new world.

The rivulets of water on Charles’ face look like tears, but his eyes are clear and sharp. 

“No,” it’s almost soft enough to be stolen by the wind.

“No? And just how will you stop me?”

Trembling hands rise, reaching for his face, for his helmet perhaps, but he doesn’t stop them. The device is wedded to his head as easily as he’d pinned his body to the floor of the Blackbird, he has nothing to fear.

But then the hands bypass the rim of his helmet, sliding around his head, and Charles kisses him.

Despair wells in him because it’s soft and gentle and utterly _perfect_ , but it’s still not enough. It represents the fruition of things he’d never dared allow himself to hope for and possibilities he’s never dreamed of.

But it’s not enough and the small, secret parts of him which still despise cruelty, however necessary, cry out in anguish at the thought that he will have to tell Charles, _Your love is not enough. You are not enough._

The wind is picking up.

Selfish, he presses forward minutely as the pressure on his mouth begins to ease, wanting to draw out the moment, this kiss goodbye. And it is there, in that long instant that they are joined, that he feels it.

Charles’ mind whips out wide, spreading and sweeping, and his helmet sings at the force of it.

Memory flares, the oppressive heat of a foreign city, an old man dark and wrinkled, offering him a foul-smelling cigarette as they stand in the door of a café, watching the inevitable approach of a thunderhead, _Mawsim._

A reversal.

Slowly, impossibly, the warships are turning.

Charles trembles as though he might fall and he catches him without thinking. Impossible to comprehend, the force required to alter even a single mind.

And there are thousands.

Charles’ head sags onto his shoulder and he hears a whisper beneath the scream of the wind, “I will never stop working for peace, my friend, but I realize that our time is not now. They will go home, and they will remember how close they came to destruction, and they will not remember bearing witness to things they do not yet understand.” He raises his head and looks him in the eyes, “But they will return with a greater capacity for acceptance, and when one of their daughters runs up to her father and shows him she can fly like a bird, can climb the walls like a spider, he will say ‘That’s amazing, little one. You are amazing.’”

Charles smiles at him, unspeakably sad, and says “I’m sorry, Erik. I will not let you turn an evolutionary progression into a war. I’m afraid you’re going to have to find another way to live.” while his face says, _I know that I am not enough, that my love is insufficient, but I offer you this betrayal, my best-beloved one. I have betrayed myself for you._

That more than anything, makes him take the helmet off.


End file.
